- Joan Mahiques Climent (Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art)
The analysis of a large corpus of medieval Catalan poetry allows us to bind the use of tetrastich and some monorhyme series to the Occitan-Catalan post-troubadour poetry of thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Catalan poetry of fifteenth and sixteenth centuries written in monorhythmic lines is smaller in proportion to that of previous centuries. Most of the works studied here are religious and anonymous. The manuscripts of these compositions are characterized by metrical irregularity, although some poems based in pre-existing melodies, such as Veni, creator Spiritus, which stands out because of its clear tendency to strophic regularity. In fact, some poems have musical notation or rubrics that indicate the tone in which they might be sung. Finally, it is emphasized the use of octosyllabic and decasyllabic verse with caesura; and anaphora and internal rhyme as some of the most common rhetorical devices, specially in long-line stanzas. Read more